Hong Kong is a strange beast, a schizy megalopolis with an awful lot of
money and very little soul. At eye level it's shops and bars, but up
above, it's strictly business: giddy monoliths of marble and steel drip
air-conditioner water onto pedestrians below. Heavy clouds drop dark
shadows into the South China Sea, and the humidity makes clothes stick to
the skin like Colorforms. Climbing out of the Quarry Bay MTR subway
station into pork bun-steamer heat, I slog past fashion outlets blasting
meat-locker cold. Sweat freezes to ice in the nape of my neck, only to
boil off again a few seconds later.

I'm looking for the coolest man in town. Five minutes later, buzzed
through new security doors into the offices of Next magazine, I find him.

Jimmy Lai sits at a round table, hands folded. Hong Kong's most notorious
media maven is 46 but looks well under 30. His crew cut is thick as a
carpet, without a single gray hair. I can't see a line on his cherubic,
almost beatific face - or a sweat stain under the arms of his tailored
shirt. It's hard to believe this is the same guy who's being threatened by
organized crime, hounded by vandals, and sued for libel by the People's
Republic of China.

Lai is a legend in Hong Kong. In 1960, at age 12, he was smuggled here
from Canton in the hull of a boat. The former street urchin took a
succession of jobs in garment factories and picked up some English along
the way. Smart and ambitious, he quickly rose through the ranks until, in
1975, he started his own clothing line. Giordano (named, oddly, after an
Italian restaurant in New York) now has 600 stores throughout Asia,
pulling US$350 million in annual sales. But Lai became bored with retail.
The offspring of his ennui was a ground-breaking weekly called Next,
conceived on June 4, 1989, as Lai sat in his Hong Kong living room glued
to the Cable News Network's coverage from Beijing.

"I got the idea to do this magazine during the Tiananmen
massacre," he nods. "The fact that the Chinese government was
responding to the demand for democracy by shooting people - that they were
completely unable to deal with the demonstration - showed me just how
desperate and doomed they were. I realized right then that there was no
reverse role for China. It would have to open up to the free flow of
information; and when it did, it would be the biggest market in the
world."

Tiananmen was China's first lesson in the realities of contemporary media
technology, and it was a brutal one.

"The Chinese government had no idea the media was so powerful."
Lai leans back in his chair, thumbing his suspenders. "Otherwise, I
don't think they would have dared handle the events of June 4 the way they
did. The price they paid was higher than any they could have imagined. No
dictatorship, no government in history has ever been exposed to the world
as instantly as the Chinese government was during that massacre."

Lai's response to Tiananmen has been to twist the knife. Using information
as a weapon - or, more accurately, a crowbar - he's trying to forcefully
jimmy the lid off one of the world's most xenophobic and
information-starved nations.

"I've always wanted to change things." Lai's stocky, compact
frame conceals restless energies; I wouldn't be surprised to learn he was
a martial arts expert. "The events of June 4 gave me the inspiration
I needed. Now I'm no longer in a business that just delivers merchandise
and makes money; I'm in a business that delivers information - and
information is freedom. That's a great motivator for me. I've never been
able to relate to my home country, yet now I'm directly involved in
bringing more freedom to the Chinese people."

This kind of idealism might seem naive to jaded westerners, but the
situation in Hong Kong demands it. The territory, ceded to the British for
99 years in 1898, reverts to Chinese control on July 1, 1997. Free-market
visionaries like Jimmy Lai have a real interest in preserving freedom of
information, and it's hard to imagine a better way to trump the incoming
regime than by establishing a popular, fearless
magazine.

Jeff Greenwald is a contributing editor of Wired. His "Big World" is a biweekly feature on GNN's Travel Resource Center.